


Runaway, or 50 Ways to Leave Your Culler

by HestiasHearth



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Beforus, Gen, I'll add more tags as it gets more specific, Meenah is a small child who's very bad at internet safety, Mituna isn't here yet but I swear he's important, Pre-Sburb/Sgrub, as for warnings I don't know what to tag it for but, bad Meenah, for now I don't think any warnings are necessary, kids run away, lots of politics eventually, stop talking to strangers, uhhhhhh
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-03
Updated: 2016-10-03
Packaged: 2018-08-19 00:33:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8182094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HestiasHearth/pseuds/HestiasHearth
Summary: Just weeks before her fifth wriggling day, Meenah Piexes decided to disappear. She never much wanted to be important.Kankri, on the other hand, did, and desperately.





	

When she was four sweeps, eleven perigees, and nine days old, Beforus’s heiress apparent went missing.

It was on every major channel for weeks. A few immediately cried foul play – she’s been kidnapped, someone will call for a ransom; her ideas were too dangerous, she’s been killed or silenced; maybe she was too volatile a child. Maybe a member of the council or upper courts was tired of fuchsia rule, trying to invoke old legal failsafes to pass Her Benevolent Radiance’s crown on to them instead. It’s funny, except that it’s not, the way that Beforus is so incredibly unwilling to question its Empress and her council until a bratty fuchsia media starlet goes missing.

Investigative journalism isn’t much of a thing on Beforus - sometimes one will find a couple low-budget blogs to that end, with their shitty camcorders and semi-official interviews over topics dubbed conspiracy theories at best, but even with all the buzz around the heiress’s case they didn’t find much to report. Out of some kind of respect, people dropped her name out of their teasing rhymes. The Empress herself made an appearance – in white, for mourning, and with hardly a tasteful flounce in her gown here or there - in each district, speaking about difficult times and lost innocence and how it’s times like these that prove Beforus’s ability to band together, to become an even more culturally and spiritually united front and help each other heal.

(She made a less-official appearance, a few speculated, in the office of the Head Matron, because there must be _something_ that can be done to speed along the production of an heir.)

And then within the season, news outlets found an adorable reformed juvenile delinquent to cover, and the more underground blogs and newsletters found two new hate crimes and an unreported shortage in the fifth western district. A sweep and change passed, and the heiress faded out of the public eye.

 

The alarm clock blares, and it turns out that tonight's 22:30:00 Central Standard Time is unfairly bright on the moon.

Maybe she should just turn it off, she muses, grumbling to herself all the while. A girl's sleep schedule's gotta adjust eventually. Everything else has: the change in gravity, the thinner air, the colder nights and warmer days. Fuchsias are good at adapting. She only rarely misses the ocean - and it's kinda fun to instead be a little part of the gravity that controls it. Oh, were you planning on taking your little fishing boat out and churning up the water _tonight?_ Fuck you, Beforus, we're pulling the tide out.

(She knows that the tide itself has very little to do with safe boating conditions. She also knows, however, that boats are annoying and noisy, and she'll latch on to whatever little means she has to spite them.)

It's a nice setup she'd got going here. Her recuperacoon isn't all that high class as it used to be, but she's got the finer grade of sopor for it and she remembers to change it semi-regularly. It's set up in one of the building's grander hallways - it turns out there are all sorts of abandoned structures on the far side of the moon, horrorterrors know why - because all of the blocks have windows, and she hadn't brought curtains, and it was a fucking embarrassing thing to ask for. Eventually she did cover most of them. But by then she'd grown accustomed to her affectionately-dubbed respitehallway, and moving a recuperacoon was a pain, so the arrangement stuck.

She slips out of the recuperacoon and towels off, content to wash later. It's good to seal in a bit of that moisture anyway- gross, yes, but otherwise the dust gets all clogged in her gills and that's infinitely worse. No one's around - isn't that nice? no one's ever around - and so she just slips on a pair of boxers and some fairly worn boots without any socks, and that'll do.

It's unfairly bright, yes, but never unpleasantly warm, and that's one thing she likes about the moon. On Beforus, being on land meant being overheated and uncomfortable, but here everything is pleasantly cool against her skin. Too thin, of course, to remind her of the water, but its gravity lends her a sort of buoyancy, and that's proven to be just as comforting.

She can't look through the windows right now, but when she could she'd always like what she saw. None of those silly pastels and their clean gleaming surfaces, street after street of buildings you can't tell apart but by their cleanliness and sign. The moon was rocks and dust, and all of it in a sensible, attractive fuchsia. To look over it from a distance, it was a little like crushed velvet, smooth craters and rugged rock formations all coated with an inches-thick layer of dust. Like crushed velvet that maybe wasn't _intended_ to be crushed, but you wore it as playclothes once and it sure is now, and the adults don't really tell you it's wrong but they have that way of shaking their heads as they throw that skirt out and buy you a new one.

And that's another thing about the moon, it's _yours._ Hers, property of Meenah Piexes. Supposedly, of course, a lot of things had been hers and a lot more was going to be when she inherited the throne, but nah. Not really. That's the kind of _yours_ that means you can set it on a shelf and nod sagely about how pretty it is, the kind of _yours_ that means yes, that certainly is your trowel, but we're playing in this sandtrap together and you have to _share_. But the moon- the moon is _hers_ , and so is everything on it, and adults don't get to decide that you've ruined it or you're using it improperly or tut their tongues in the corner before teaching you how to own it the _responsible_ way. What's the point of luxury, Meenah had always wondered, if you're not allowed to tear it apart?

This building in particular is a testament to little Meenah's philosophy. Its absolutely cavernous main room would remind her of some kind of meeting center or cathedral, if she understood cultures that would use such a space, which - the purpleblood faith being gently coerced out of any overly rich or ostentatious practices - she doesn't. It's gorgeous, actually- but it's not a _museum_. One look around the room is enough to gather that Meenah really takes pride in breaking shit.

There's a window left crumbling after she managed to pull three successive curtain rods from the wall above it, one from catching herself after the stairs above it crumbled under her feet, and twice from childish attempts at acrobatics. Those few less-sturdy stairs have been kicked out completely, making getting to the upper balconies almost something of an obstacle course. At the center used to be some kind of vaguely creepy flower thing, and the gigantic timer sitting beneath it made it almost difficult to move, but she is after all a tyrian and she managed. It's lying at some odd angle outside the rear entrance she never used, timer probably still permanently stuck at 01:26:00. Looks like it had been counting down from billions at some point, but one enthusiastic toss across the room left it stuck there, and it hasn't started up since.

She still checks on it every now and then. You know, in case it's a bomb or something.

As time went on, that wound up being the room she used least, because no matter how many personal touches she put on it, it remained palace-like and cavernous and empty. When she wants wide open spaces she can step outside, the world really is her oyster. When she wants dark eerie buildings to explore she can take to the crumbling towers, or dig through the debris covering the secret passages between them, or wander the moon's surface until she finds some sealed, decrepit building she's yet to explore.

A lot of those decrepit buildings have started to fill up - one with trash, another with stores of bubble gum, a few others with just enough furniture to feel comfy. As ablutionblocks go she has a bit of a camp set-up, and gallons of water are particularly easy to transportalize- it was getting the transportalizer running that had been an issue. (Those first few nights before she had it up and running were spent particularly thirsty and particularly smelly.) Once it was up there had always been enough people who would listen to her, nurses whom she still allowed access to her saved-up allowance and estate so long as they sent her what she needed when she needed it. Money hushes people up easily. Besides, she knew which adults would be cool about it and which ones she needed to shut out of her accounts and business, these were the trolls who had raised her. That was easy.

She's a teensy bit too reliant on the transportalizer set-up, to be honest. Sometimes it makes her a little uneasy, still counting on people like that. But eh, they're getting paid. No one's doing her any favors.

The meal block (not quite a kitchen, by any definition) is housed in the second tower to the west, because that's the one that has functional outlets. She's entirely unsure why, and probably ought to question it more considering the rest of the building looks like it hasn't been touched since pre-Imperial history - but she's five and she doesn't.

Once she's through that main room it's a dash down two winding halls to the tower, and then a brief sprint up the wall in place of the long-missing staircase to its door. Also in the meal block is her husktop, blinking by the same outlet as the fridge. She flips it open with the toe of her boot, glancing at the screen as she yanks open the fridge.

\--cicerosColloquy [CC] sent you a contact request--

Already drafting her hilarious, witty comeback for when she's inevitably asked her ASL, she rummages through the fridge half-blindly and settles on root-vegetable juice and- is that cheese? And cheese, sure. She settles down with her back against the floor and legs propped up against the wall, propped up on her elbows just enough to keep from choking. She'd be fine, but gill maintenance is not fun. Let's not. She's halfway through her balanced breakfast when her eyes flick back to the open trollian tab, contact request still blinking nonstop.

Okay, fine, what does this guy want.

She accepts the contact request only to scare them off, typing up her warm welcome - sans puns, unfortunately (the things she does for anonymity) - only to find CC already halfway through copy-pasting some prewritten spiel.

CC: Hey, nice t9 meet y9u Meenah. It’s Meenah, isn’t it?  
CC: I h9pe this d9esn’t fall t99 far 9ut 9f line, 6ut s9 far as I’m aware, y9u’ve really d9ne an amazing j96 9f... h9w d9 y9u say it. 9f erasing y9urself 9ut 9f the pu6lic c9nsci9usness, there we g9. H9w many pr9xies are y9u 6ehind right now?  
AA: how tf did you find this account  
CC: 9r n9, I know that isn’t all there is t9 it. A friend 9f mine kn9ws his way ar9und the m9re technical aspects, which 9f c9urse I’ll need t9 learn 6ef9re this is all 9ver, 6ut y9u’ve really d9ne a th9r9ugh j96. And I can 9nly applaud y9u f9r it - t9 see a fuchsia challenge th9se hereditary p9wer structures, really, it’s... well it's a damn g99d thing, anyway. Kud9s, and all that. Really rest9ring my faith in the upper s9ci9ec9n9mic echel9ns.  
CC: N9w, as s9me9ne in a similar p9sition:  
AA: yea okay nice speech and im lookin forward to nursin the headache i get from your text but how the fuck did you find this account  
AA: and do you think you could pick a normal grey or somethin like the rest of us anons?

They’re a social worker. They _sound_ like a social worker, and of-fucking-course they would be, they're still _looking._ Random connects she could handle, that's what she's come to  _expect_ , no one else on Beforus would be so fucked in the pan as to still be looking for a fairly irrelevant missing child. Hell, they hit every bad-acting point on the list: there they go pretending to be less informed than they are, making amateur mistakes, even throwing in a Swear to assure her they're one of the kids.

They're a social worker, and that means an uncomfortable ride home and adults staring at you the whole way there, and then linoleum floors and physicals and psych evaluations and a therapist and a custodian and new clothes that aren't caked with a comfortable layer of dirt and aren't yours and Meenah is _not doing that tonight_.

She blocks them immediately and slams her husktop shut.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's surprisingly uncomfortable to write for Meenah without using a single fish pun.
> 
> Anyway, I really needed something I could just write and not be so perfectionistic about, and even at that this chapter took me ages to write. But here it is! As usual, I can't promise a regular update schedule, but I'll be working at it whenever I get the chance.
> 
> For all you who, like teenage me, are completely incompetent at online chat clients: ASL is age/sex/location.


End file.
